Sebastian Payne

The row over Grant Shapps’ bingo poster is an example of what happens when politicians assume that what goes in the Westminster bubble stays there. David Cameron and Paul Dacre may be right that ’too many tweets make a twat’ and Twitter can be a ‘phoney world’. But occasionally, one tweet can move into the real world too. As Isabel reported yesterday, Conservative HQ’s ineffectual response to the misjudged Bingo poster suggests that they hoped the anger could be contained amongst the anti-Conservative brigade, many of whom spend their days tweeting abuse to George Osborne. But the number of spoofs (a selection can be seen above) and the fury within the Conservative party made this irresistible for the print media.

Are voters really concerned about how many Old Etonians David Cameron surrounds himself with? Judging by the cutting remarks from Michael Gove and Sayeeda Warsi it matters a lot, but opinion polling tells a slightly different, more troubling tale about how people feel about the ‘political class’. On the Eton question, YouGov recently carried out a poll asking which characteristics they found most unsuitable for a ‘leading politician’.

Who votes Ukip? It’s a question psephologists have been trying to answer for years but Nigel Farage had a clear response on the Sunday Politics today: not just disaffected Conservatives. Based on research by Lord Ashcroft, Farage boasted that ’new Ukip’ — a party which is 'a lot of more professional, a lot more smiley, a lot less angry’ — now has such a great influence on the Labour party, they will be forced into changing their stance on an EU referendum following May’s Euro elections: 'There's a long way to go between now and the next election. As we've seen with Conservative policy, it chops and changes...

Like it or not, Question Time is Britain’s most popular forum for political debate. Two million viewers regularly tune in, and Thursday evenings on BBC1 is when and where ordinary people are most likely to encounter a secretary of state or shadow cabinet minister. For politicians, it’s a golden opportunity — a huge audience to which they can sell both themselves and their party’s policies. The choice of guests usually causes an uproar on Twitter — mostly along the lines of 'why is X appearing again? ' and ' I’m sick of seeing Y party getting so much airtime' — but who actually appears most frequently?

How can the Tory party broaden its appeal? Renewal, a group founded to do just that offered its answer at a packed Westminster pub yesterday evening. With just eight days to George Osborne’s 2014 budget, Robert Halfon MP and Renewal’s David Skelton offered their vision of a ‘workers' budget for the Workers’ Party.' Arguing that ‘what happened in Scotland [to the Conservative party] is slowly happening in the North’, Halfon outlined why he believes the Conservative Party needs to change its narrative, mission and structures to go beyond its traditional reach, particularly with working class and ethnic minority voters.

Haters of HS2 rejoice: the project has an even better chance of failing now. Following James’ revelation that the Transport Secretary doesn’t believe the Hybrid Bill will pass through Parliament before the next election, there are several scenarios on how the parties may change their stance on the project. If a cross-party consensus falls apart, HS2 will run into severe difficulties. Nearly all of the possibilities pose a threat to the line actually being built: 1. David Cameron remains Prime Minister James played out this scenario in his blog yesterday, explaining why it matters that HS2 will be a big issue at the next general election.

With a mere whimper, the government has released its controversial report (pdf) on the effects of immigration on ‘native UK employment’. Following Newsnight’s revelations that the report was being ‘held back’, Labour demanded its release. 24 hours later, it was put online while Theresa May was informing MPs of an inquiry into undercover policing after revelations about the treatment of Stephen Lawrence's family. Here are the top five things you need to know from the paper: 1. There’s minimal evidence of migrants taking British jobs The Home Office report titled ‘Impacts of migration on UK native employment' reveals there is ‘relatively little evidence’ of British workers being displaced — i.e.

It’s difficult to figure out exactly what’s going on in Ukraine and what it all means — as Freddy has pointed out there’s a lot of hyperbole at the moment— but where is public opinion on the current situation? There’s some interesting historic polling on where Ukrainians stand on more integration with Europe vs Russia. Ukraine’s ambassador to the European Union Kostyantyn Yeliseyev suggested in 2011 that business tycoons and politicians from the Russian-speaking Eastern regions are just as on board with more EU integration as those from western regions. Yeliseyev noted at the time ‘if any politician today in Ukraine declared himself to be against European integration, he would be politically dead’. The situation is no longer as clear.

Today we glimpsed what Boris Johnson might do if he had more power, in London at least: jack up council taxes for some and lower business rates. In a Communities and Local Government select committee hearing on fiscal devolution, the Mayor of London outlined why, if the power was handed down from central government, he’d  increase council tax for the richest Londoners: ‘If you compared with a Russian oligarch is paying on his stuccoed schloss in Kensington in annual council tax compared to what such a gentleman might be asked to pay in Paris or New York or anywhere else, it is quite stunning the difference. No one has yet grasped that. ‘I’m by no means an advocate of a mansion tax. In fact, I vehemently oppose such an idea.

At last - Labour has made its intentions over education clear. Throughout his interview on the Sunday Politics today, Tristram Hunt showed that Labour has switched allegiances to adults, not the pupils. On the side of institutions, not those who use them. Although the shadow education secretary stated he ‘doesn’t want to waste political energy on undoing reforms that, in certain situations, build rather successfully on Labour party policy’, he confirmed his party would not sanction any more free schools: 'I was in Stroud on Thursday and plans there for a big new style of school in an area where you’ve got surplus places threatened to destroy the viability of small local rural schools.